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New domain name for existing site

Our business has aquired a new domain name because there are several organisations closely related to ours that use similar domain names to target a niche group of users. We would like to use this new domain name to link to an existing website with content targeted at this user group as we feel that they will be more comfortable getting to the content via this new URL.

After a useful search in these forums the majority of SEOMOZ gurus suggest that the new URL should be redirected to our current site using a 301 and we are happy to do this. However do we have to link the URL to our homepage or is it acceptable to link to a subfolder within the domain and then targeting content on this page to the user niche?

Thanks for any input.

Kind regards.

_________________________________

Edit 11:38

The old url is oldcommunity.charity.com (we know having a subdomain is bad) this is where we manage all community engagement.

The new url is www.newparticularcommunity.com and we would redirect this to oldcommunity.charity.com. The reason we have bought www.oldparticularcommunity.com is because the url is used by other charities for community engagement and is recognised by the community we are targeting. We are redirecting to our old site because we do not want to engage with them on this new url as our old site oldcommunity.charity.com already does this and can cater for the new community and perhaps they haven't realised that we can.

4 Responses

Personally I don't see any objections to sending the traffic from the new url to a subfolder on the old domain. Since this page will probably be more relevant to your redirected visitors than your home page, your visitors will have a better user experience this way as well.

Kind regards,Theo

PS: I presume you're aware of the fact that this way of utilizing the new domain will keep it from ranking in the search engines? By using a 301 redirect only the old domain will rank, not the new one.

You could add an index.html on the new domain making sure you have your primary keyword in your title tag. Let the site be indexed and then 301 it to your homepage. Obviously, if the keyword in the title tag is more relevant to a subfolder then 301 it to that subfolder.

I am not sure why you are 301ing your site? Do you mean canonicalizing back to the old domain?

If you have www.OldDomain.com and www.NewDomain.com with NewDomain.com having fresh content that links back to OldDomain.com, then I would add a natural link back to OldDomain.com

If you are reposting duplicate content, then canonicalizing the page back to the old site is recommended.

Personally (without looking at your real setup), I would set the new site on its own, get all the social buzz and such generating visitors to the new site as you are intending, then link back to the old site as naturally required.

www.oldsiteCoffeeStore.com

www.newsiteCoffeeFan.com

Old site sells coffee while new site is a coffee fan site.

Let the new site generate inbound links and visitors naturally by way of being strictly a fan site talking about coffee. Then when you mention Kona Coffee, you link that back to your store's Kona Coffee landing page.

You will generate Page Authority for the new site naturally, and then push that juice to the store with excellent anchor text. And you should also link out to other sites of relevance, although not stores in this case : )

If you goal is to 301 all the pages of the new site to the old one, I would suggest to make the new site with the right pages for the different search terms you target, let it be indexed and ranked, get a few backlinks to keep the domain somehow "visible" to google. This process should take a couple of months.

Once this is done, create a redirect script on the new site.

If you want to rank deep pages of the old site, the script should redirect user to the page of the old site which correspond the best with the new site page.

If you want to rank the homepage of the old site, just redirect all requests to this homepage.

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